Maltese Tiger

If there are White Tiger, there are also Maltese Tiger!

Maltese Tiger

The Maltese tiger, or blue tiger, is a semi-hypothetical coloration morph of a tiger, reported mostly in the Fujian Province of China. It is said to have bluish fur with dark grey stripes. Most of the Maltese tigers reported have been of the South Chinese subspecies. The South Chinese tiger today is critically endangered, and the "blue" alleles may be wholly extinct. Blue tigers have also been reported in Korea, home of Siberian tigers.

The term "Maltese" comes from domestic cat terminology for blue fur, and refers to the slate grey coloration. Many cats with such colouration are present in Malta, which may have given rise to the use of the adjective in this context.

Genetics

In support of the blue tiger theory, Maltese-colored cats certainly do exist. The most common are a domestic cat breed, the Russian Blue, and a variety of the British Shorthair, the British Blue, but blue bobcats and lynxes have also been recorded, and there are genetic mutations and combinations that result in bluish hue, or at least in the impression of a blue-gray animal. Shuker suggested that blue tigers possessed two different pairs of recessive alleles – the non-agouti (s/s), and the dilute (d/d)[3] which combine to produce a solid blue-gray colour as found in domestic cats such as the British Blue and Russian Blue, but would not produce the striped blue tigers reported.

Roar

White tigers are not albinos, as they retain their black stripes. Rather, the fur between the stripes lacks pheomelanin entirely. Simply combining non-agouti and dilute alleles would probably indeed result in a greyish or "maltese" tiger, but such an animal would have hardly-visible stripes or none at all: Normal tigers switch between agouti (orange) and non-agouti (black) in different areas of their pelage, as well as suppressing melanin production thoroughly (white).

The non-agouti mutation would produce animals similar to black panthers which have only a "ghost" pattern, all hair being black but the hairs of their rosettes retaining a different texture and thus, "black-on-black" rosettes are visible under appropriate lighting. Combined with all-dilute alleles, the color would be grey, but it would still result in an unstriped or ghost-striped tiger.

Relaxing

For a Maltese-and-striped fur, pheomelanin production must probably be suppressed (to switch from an orange to a greyish color) but agouti retained (to yield darker stripes); perhaps some hypermelanism would also be present, to produce an animal with a non-white belly as reported by Caldwell. Indeed, such a genotype is known in cheetahs, where it produces animals that are bluish gray with dark slate grey pattern. If factors such as lighting conditions are accounted for, this makes a reasonable match with Caldwell's individual.